This op-ed was originally published by The Salt Lake Tribune.
If you know about the drying Great Salt Lake — and nearly all Utahns do — you likely learned about it from the Great Salt Lake Collaborative. At least, that was my sense; I’ve spent the last two years working to test that hypothesis and other research questions about how we think about, talk about and act to save Great Salt Lake.
This question became important to me when my organization, the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University, joined the Great Salt Lake Collaborative as a community partner in 2022. The Collaborative is built on the model of “solutions journalism,” which focuses on how people are responding to problems, not just the problems themselves. The 19 participating members share content instead of competing. They amplify messages instead of contradicting. The former journalist in me, as well as other researchers and national journalism organizations, recognized that this Collaborative was exceptional.
As part of my doctoral dissertation work, I found that prior to the Collaborative’s formation, coverage of Great Salt Lake was sparse. In the two-and-a-half years before 2022, partner newsrooms published just 144 stories with “Great Salt Lake” as a keyword. In the two-and-a-half years after the Collaborative launched, that number grew to 2,546 stories, a more than 20-fold increase. This includes nearly 700 original Collaborative stories, hundreds more that were reprinted across partner platforms and over 1,600 others that referenced or explored the issue in new contexts.
This was not simply a reaction to the lake’s worsening condition. When we compared member newsrooms to similar outlets that didn’t join the Collaborative, the difference in coverage growth was striking. Non-member outlets increased their Great Salt Lake reporting by about 300% — significant, but far less than what we saw among Collaborative partners. The data suggest that the Collaborative created real, additive capacity — not just more stories, but more sustained focus.
In addition to expanding coverage, the Collaborative has organized panels, workshops, multimedia, newsletters, public writing initiatives and even a university journalism course. It also recorded the growing network of actors — from scientists and legislators to Tribal leaders and schoolchildren — who are now deeply involved in efforts to save the lake.
But the Collaborative also did something else: It created tools and messages that help people from different sectors understand and act on shared values. One of the most effective, perhaps, is the unifying idea that “the lake is worth saving.”
As a result of what we learned, we joined with partners to help launch the Colorado River Collaborative, modeled in part on the Great Salt Lake effort. We saw firsthand the power of coordinated storytelling and elevated public awareness, and we wanted to support similar momentum on another critical issue in the Intermountain West. Over the past year, Utah coverage has shifted from one of national reprints to in-depth local perspectives.
To be clear, Great Salt Lake, the Colorado River and many of our state’s natural treasures are still in crisis. But, the connections that have been placed around these issues — communication, context and nuanced in-depth knowledge — have been strengthened. The lesson here is that collaboration itself is a solution — a system we can build and maintain to support awareness, responsiveness and better decision making.
It’s worth recognizing that in a time when journalism is too often underfunded or under attack, this project has done what journalism aspires to do at its best: not just report the facts, but move the conversation forward.
